Social

Can’t offer the shipping deal anymore

We just launched our new site earlier this week and are working out any issues as things shake out.

One thing that has come to our attention is that we need to clarify some details behind the fact that we can no longer offer the shipping deal of 1/2 price ground shipping on orders over $50 that we offered on the old system.

A little background, back in 2012 we ran a little test of trying different ways of giving discounts to larger orders and being able to offer a way to cover 1/2 of the ground shipping cost is what stuck. Shoppers online are used to getting cheap or free shipping, thanks to Amazon, but as a very small operation there was no way we could offer free shipping and take a loss on it like Amazon does (ref: Marketwatch).

On the old system, we were able to do this technically because we were writing all the code and were able to do some custom software to make it work.

One of the reasons we made the decision to move to a new software platform was just the fact that we needed to keep up with the times (the code we were working with was circa 2007). Everything worked fine, but it was getting old and there are better ways of doing things and now the availability of better features.

We investigated many commerce platforms and each had pros and cons, so we had to weigh everything before making a decision on what platform to go with. Unfortunately the new platform we chose doesn’t have a way for us to discount the shipping, but it has other features that we felt outweighed it.

To replace the discounted shipping, we have introduced 2 new incentives, a Rewards Program and automatic price discounts based on quantity (on certain products).

With the Rewards Program, for each order placed you get points that accumulate and later you can redeem them for products – you can get more of your favorites or maybe try something that you’ve seen but haven’t tried yet.

We are disappointed that the “shipping special” cannot be offered any longer, but we believe that the added features of the new system will benefit everyone in the long run.